The building housing the Werkplaats Typografie originally served as a radio distribution station. Drawing on this history, Ine Meganck, Valentijn Goethals and Paul Elliman developed the Phantom Radio, which is to this day revived every year as an integral part of the degree programme. In 2020/21, Marcus Wachter launched the Phantom Radio Saturday Matinee 3PM All Ages, in which two people could always take over a joint live radio stream – either in parallel or in sync with one another.

Amira Prescott and I were intrigued by the idea of going on a field trip together and turning our experience into a radio programme. We took some trains to the Amsterdamse Waterleidingduinen, a nature reserve not far from Zandvoort that supplies the city of Amsterdam with drinking water. Each of us brought an audio recorder and we set off in search of sounds. As luck would have it, we’d chosen a gloomy day with a particularly strong wind. As a result, practically all our recordings were drowned out by a tremendous roar.

When we met a few days later to put the programme together, we quickly decided to have it revolve around weather – as it had practically forced its way into our recordings. We put together a playlist of songs that, for us, captured the atmosphere of that day in the Waterleidingduinen. We interspersed the music with our own audio recordings as well as excerpts from the BBC Shipping Forecast. This weather forecast was originally intended for seafarers, but enjoyed great popularity amongst the British due to its melodic and downright poetic quality, and is even said to help some people fall asleep.

Amira edited the many short videos we’d filmed throughout the day into a long, meditative sequence, repeatedly interweaving our footage with diagrams from O. G. Sutton’s book “Understanding Weather”, from which we’d also taken the title for our programme: “Feeble Sounds of Low Frequency”.